Symbols

The onion The onion is a folk fable that Grushenka tells Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov on the day the elder's body begins to smell, which she had heard in childhood from the cook Matryona: a wicked woman dies without any virtue except an onion pulled from the vegetable... The noxious odor The foul smell of decomposition that rises from Elder Zosima's coffin before three in the afternoon of the day after his death, too soon for what the monastery expected of a saint. In itself, it is the natural smell of any corpse, and the narrator recalls... The grain of wheat The verse from the Gospel of John that serves as the novel's epigraph, before the preface "From the author", and that the book later places in the hands of Elder Zosima: the grain of wheat that, if it does not fall into the earth and die, remains alone, and... The earth watered with tears The ground as a place of prayer and forgiveness: the gesture of falling to the earth, kissing it and watering it with tears, with the promise that it will bear fruit. Elder Zosima teaches it in Book VI as a rule for whoever is left alone, performs it at his... Ilyusha's stone The big stone at the start of the pasture, on the outskirts of town, which Captain Snegiryov used to take his son Ilyusha Snegiryov to every afternoon, where the boy wept in his father's arms after the humiliation in the square, and beside which he asked,... The troika The carriage drawn by three horses, which in the novel does two things at once: it carries the characters to Mokroye on the night of the crime, and later, in court, it becomes an image of Russia. On one side, it is an object: Timofey's troika that seeks... Bread and stones The bread of the first temptation in the desert, in the poem of Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov: the spirit of the desert shows Christ stones and proposes that he turn them into loaves, and the Grand Inquisitor reads there the offer of a bought obedience, a...